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As we have learned on the previous dapim, there are several different dates on the calendar that distinguish one agricultural year from another. This is significant in establishing when tithes are taken, since every individual year’s harvest must have terumot and ma’asrot taken separately.
We have seen that the Mishnah (2a) teaches that the first day of Tishrei is the date of the new year for vegetables, while the new year for fruits begins in Shevat when most of the year’s rains have already fallen.
Our daf ends the rabbis' debates regarding our last Mishna on the many different New Years. Their discussions have allowed us to better understand halachot surrounding planting ,harvesting, tithing, and how we work with anomalies like the Sabbatical year and plants that take three years to produce ripe fruit.
The etrog continues to be used to elucidate our rabbis' arguments.
As it produces valuable fruit and it is a short tree; because it grows a fruit used for ritual purposes, the rabbis use this tree to explain their dilemmas. One of these regards tithing: if a fruit is planted or begins to grow in the sixth year of the sabbatical cycle and then it is ripe in the seventh year, can it be used and tithed in the seventh year? What if it grows through the seventh year but ripens in the eighth? These questions allow our rrabbis to discuss some of the particularities of the Sabbatical year and of tithing.
Rav Yannaii's inquiry as to whether Tu Bishvat occurs during the (season) lunar or (month) solar cycle allows us to explore further a fundamental cosmic difference and ambiguity of this festival and its halachic impact.